From The Closet: `Same-sex Marriage' Liturgy

John Boswell, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History at Yale University, has been recognized as a pre- eminent historian since his scholarly ``Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality'' won the American Book Award for History in 1981.

In that earlier book, he contended that early Christianity, influenced by Greek culture, was not inherently hostile to homosexuality.

His newest book, ``Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe,'' describes a most curious liturgical practice in which two men -- and most rarely, women -- were bound together by a priest in a church ceremony.

The ritual language in more than 60 texts Boswell found, dating from the 8th through the 16th centuries, closely resembles that used for heterosexual weddings. The ceremonies were performed in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, from Ireland and Germany through Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to the Middle East.

He argues that it is clear that the liturgies ``functioned in the past as a `gay marriage ceremony.' ''

``In almost every age and place the ceremony fulfilled what most people today regard as the essence of marriage: a permanent romantic commitment between two people, witnessed and recognized by the community,'' he writes.

Only in more recent centuries, when homosexuality came to be viewed with such repugnance as to be called ``the sin that could not be named,'' were the ceremonies repressed, the author says.

That they were viewed as having an erotic connotation, he writes, was indicated by the language in which they were repressed. For example, he notes, a Greek synod prohibited the ceremony as a ``practice against the law, against nature.''

They remained an almost unmentionable curio for antiquarians until Boswell brought them out of the closet.

His is a scholarly work in which the footnotes make up a half or more of each of the pages, and citations refer to texts in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Old Church Slavonic. No Latin texts could be found and were probably destroyed, he says, citing evidence of some having been ripped out of liturgical books.

Yet his thesis is so accessible, not to say sensational, that Garry Trudeau, the satirical cartoonist, easily worked it into ``Doonesbury'' even before the book was available in the stores. It probably was the first time in history a scholarly tome made its debut in a comic strip.

The reaction has been visceral. ``Just plain bulls...'' was the succinct opinion of a Byzantine scholar in Rome, as reported by the Catholic News Service.

Most of the objections are from those who say the ceremonies cemented a spiritual brotherhood or some sort of adoptive relationship in cultures we no longer understand and Boswell misinterprets.

A most logical objection is: Why would the church legitimize in a ceremony what was condemned morally? Punishment for sodomy in many times and places was death.

Boswell suggests the practice may have been adapted from pagan culture, as many Christian customs were. The marriage ceremony in the Western church, for instance, was borrowed virtually unchanged from pagan Rome. Only the name of the deity changed. Similarly, Boswell notes, Venus metamorphosed into the Virgin Mary and Cupid became the child Jesus.

Was it the same for same-sex unions, an adapted pagan practice that continued until the church could no longer sustain its contradictory position in the liturgy?

Gay activists will accept the author's thesis without question to undergird their quest for renewed blessing of same-sex unions in church. To other medieval scholars, Boswell (himself a gay activist) has thrown down the gauntlet: ``Prove me wrong.''